Ross Alex. The rest is noice

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equivalent in music still sends ripples of unease through concert audiences and

makes little perceptible impact on the outside world. Classical music is

stereotyped as an art of the dead, a repertory that begins with Bach and

terminates with Mahler and Puccini. People are sometimes surprised to learn

that composers are still writing at all.

Yet these sounds are hardly alien. Atonal chords crop up in jazz; avant-garde

sounds appear in Hollywood film scores; minimalism has marked rock, pop, and

dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Sometimes the music

resembles noise because it is noise, or near to it, by design. Sometimes, as

with Berg’s Wozzeck, it mixes the familiar and the strange, consonance and

dissonance. Sometimes it is so singularly beautiful that people gasp in wonder

when they hear it. Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, with its

grandly singing lines and gently ringing chords, stops time with each

performance.

Because composers have infiltrated every aspect of modern existence, their

work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise

chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators,

millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the

intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers,

and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the

audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were

doing; the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the

revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social

transformations that reshaped the landscape in which composers worked.

What the march of history really has to do with music itself is the subject of

sharp debate. In the classical field it has long been fashionable to fence music

off from society, to declare it a self-sufficient language. In the hyper-political

twentieth century, that barrier crumbles time and again: Béla Bartók writes

string quartets inspired by field recordings of Transylvanian folk songs,

Shostakovich works on his Leningrad Symphony while German guns are firing

on the city, John Adams creates an opera starring Richard Nixon and Mao

Zedong. Nevertheless, articulating the connection between music and the outer

world remains devilishly difficult. Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the

end, deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music

means, music can tell us something about history. My subtitle is meant literally;

this is the twentieth century heard through its music.

Histories of music since 1900 often take the form of a teleological tale, a goal-

obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward and heroic battles with the

philistine bourgeoisie. When the concept of progress assumes exaggerated

importance, many works are struck from the historical record on the grounds

that they have nothing new to say. These pieces often happen to be those that

have found a broader public—the symphonies of Sibelius and Shostakovich,

Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Carl Orff’s Carmina burana. Two distinct

repertories have formed, one intellectual and one popular. Here they are

merged: no language is considered intrinsically more modern than any other.

In the same way, the story criss-crosses the often ill-defined or imaginary

border separating classical music from neighboring genres. Duke Ellington,

Miles Davis, the Beatles, and the Velvet Underground have substantial walk-on

roles, as the conversation between Gershwin and Berg goes on from generation

to generation. Berg was right: music unfolds along an unbroken continuum,

however dissimilar the sounds on the surface. Music is always migrating from

its point of origin to its destiny in someone’s fleeting moment of experience—

last night’s concert, tomorrow’s solitary jog.

The Rest Is Noise is written not just for those well versed in classical music but

also—especially—for those who feel passing curiosity about this obscure

pandemonium on the outskirts of culture. I approach the subject from multiple

angles: biography, musical description, cultural and social history, evocations of

place, raw politics, firsthand accounts by the participants themselves. Each

chapter cuts a wide swath through a given period, but there is no attempt to be

comprehensive: certain careers stand in for entire scenes, certain key pieces

stand in for entire careers, and much great music is left on the cutting-room

floor.

A list of recommended recordings appears at the back, along with

acknowledgments of the many brilliant scholars who assisted me and citations

of the hundreds of books, articles, and archival resources that I consulted.

More, including dozens of sound samples, can be found at

www.therestisnoise.com. The abundant, benighted twentieth century is only

beginning to be seen whole.

WHERE TO LISTEN

If you would like to hear some of the music discussed in these pages, a free

audio companion is available at www.therestisnoise.com/audio. There you will

find streaming samples arranged by chapter, along with links to audio-rich Web

sites and other channels of direct access to the music. An iTunes playlist of

twenty representative excerpts can be found at www.therestisnoise.com/playlist.

For a glossary of musical terms go to www.therestisnoise.com/glossary.

Part I

1900–1933

I am ready, I feel free

To cleave the ether on a novel flight,

To novel spheres of pure activity.

—GOETHE, FAUST, PART I

THE GOLDEN AGE

Strauss, Mahler, and the Fin de Siècle

When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16, 1906, in the

Austrian city of Graz, several crowned heads of European music gathered to

witness the event. The premiere of Salome

Giacomo Puccini, the creator of

had taken place in Dresden five

months earlier, and word had got out that Strauss had created something

beyond the pale—an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an

Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work so

frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it

from the Court Opera in Vienna.

La Bohème and Tosca, made a trip north to

hear what “terribly cacophonous thing” his German rival had concocted. Gustav

Mahler, the director of the Vienna Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful

and controversial Alma. The bold young composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived

from Vienna with his brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky and no fewer than six

of his pupils. One of them, Alban Berg, traveled with an older friend, who later

recalled the “feverish impatience and boundless excitement” that all felt as the

evening approached. The widow of Johann Strauss II, composer of On the

Beautiful Blue Danube,

Ordinary music enthusiasts filled out the crowd—“young people from Vienna,

with only the vocal score as hand luggage,” Richard Strauss noted. Among

them may have been the seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler, who had just seen

Mahler conduct Richard Wagner’s

represented old Vienna.

Tristan und Isolde in Vienna. Hitler later told

Strauss’s son that he had borrowed money from relatives to make the trip.

There was even a fictional character present—Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus,

The Graz papers brought news from Croatia, where a Serbo-Croat movement

was gaining momentum, and from Russia, where the tsar was locked in conflict

with the country’s first parliament. Both stories carried tremors of future chaos—

the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the Russian Revolution

of 1917. For the moment, though, Europe maintained the facade of civilization.

The British war minister, Richard Haldane, was quoted as saying that he loved

German literature and enjoyed reciting passages from Goethe’s

the tale of a composer in league with the devil.

Strauss and Mahler, the titans of Austro-German music, spent the afternoon in

the hills above the city, as Alma Mahler recounted in her memoirs. A

photographer captured the composers outside the opera house, apparently

preparing to set out on their expedition—Strauss smiling in a boater hat, Mahler

squinting in the sun. The company visited a waterfall and had lunch in an inn,

where they sat at a plain wooden table. They must have made a strange pair:

Strauss, tall and lanky, with a bulbous forehead, a weak chin, strong but sunken

eyes; Mahler, a full head shorter, a muscular hawk of a man. As the sun began

to go down, Mahler became nervous about the time and suggested that the

party head back to the Hotel Elefant, where they were staying, to prepare for

the performance. “They can’t start without me,” Strauss said. “Let ’em wait.”

Mahler replied: “If you won’t go, then I will—and conduct in your place.”

Faust.

Mahler was forty-five, Strauss forty-one. They were in most respects polar

opposites. Mahler was a kaleidoscope of moods—childlike, heaven-storming,

despotic, despairing. In Vienna, as he strode from his apartment near the

Schwarzenbergplatz to the opera house on the Ringstrasse, cabdrivers would

whisper to their passengers, “Der Mahler!” Strauss was earthy, self-satisfied,

more than a little cynical, a closed book to most observers. The soprano

Gemma Bellincioni, who sat next to him at a banquet after the performance in

Graz, described him as “a pure kind of German, without poses, without long-

winded speeches, little gossip and no inclination to talk about himself and his

work, a gaze of steel, an indecipherable expression.” Strauss came from

Munich, a backward place in the eyes of sophisticated Viennese such as

Gustav and Alma. Alma underlined this impression in her memoir by rendering

Strauss’s dialogue in an exaggerated Bavarian dialect.

Not surprisingly, the relationship between the two composers suffered from

frequent misunderstandings. Mahler would recoil from unintended slights;

Strauss would puzzle over the sudden silences that ensued. Strauss was still

trying to understand his old colleague some four decades later, when he read

Alma’s book and annotated it. “All untrue,” he wrote, next to the description of

his behavior in Graz.

“Strauss and I tunnel from opposite sides of the mountain,” Mahler said. “One

day we shall meet.” Both saw music as a medium of conflict, a battlefield of

extremes. They reveled in the tremendous sounds that a hundred-piece

orchestra could make, yet they also released energies of fragmentation and

collapse. The heroic narratives of nineteenth-century Romanticism, from

Beethoven’s symphonies to Wagner’s music dramas, invariably ended with a

blaze of transcendence, of spiritual overcoming. Mahler and Strauss told stories

of more circuitous shape, often questioning the possibility of a truly happy

outcome.

Each made a point of supporting the other’s music. In 1901, Strauss became

president of the Allgemeiner deutscher Musikverein, or All-German Music

Association, and his first major act was to program Mahler’s Third Symphony for

the festival the following year. Mahler’s works appeared so often on the

association’s programs in subsequent seasons that some critics took to calling

the organization the Allgemeiner deutscher Mahlerverein. Others dubbed it the

Annual German Carnival of Cacophony. Mahler, for his part, marveled at

Salome. Strauss had played and sung the score for him the previous year, in a

piano shop in Strasbourg, while passersby pressed against the windows trying

to overhear. Salome

promised to be one of the highlights of Mahler’s Vienna

tenure, but the censors balked at accepting an opera in which biblical

characters perform unspeakable acts. Furious, Mahler began hinting that his

days in Vienna were numbered. He wrote to Strauss in March 1906: “You would

not believe how vexatious this matter has been for me or (between ourselves)

what consequences it may have for me.”

Salome

“The city was in a state of great excitement,” Decsey wrote in his

autobiography,

came to Graz, an elegant city of 150,000 people, capital of the

agricultural province of Styria. The Stadt-Theater staged the opera at the

suggestion of the critic Ernst Decsey, an associate of Mahler’s, who assured the

management that it would create a succès de scandale.

Music Was His Life.

As dusk fell, Mahler and Strauss finally appeared at the opera house, having

rushed back to town in their chauffeur-driven car. The crowd milling around in

the lobby had an air of nervous electricity. The orchestra played a fanfare when

“Parties formed and split. Pub philosophers

buzzed about what was going on … Visitors from the provinces, critics, press

people, reporters, and foreigners from Vienna … Three more-than-sold-out

houses. Porters groaned, and hoteliers reached for the keys to their safes.” The

critic fueled the anticipation with a preview article acclaiming Strauss’s “tone-

color world,” his “polyrhythms and polyphony,” his “breakup of the narrow old

tonality,” his “fetish ideal of an Omni-Tonality.”

Strauss walked up to the podium, and the audience applauded stormily. Then

silence descended, the clarinet played a softly slithering scale, and the curtain

went up.

In the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the princess of Judaea dances for her

stepfather, Herod, and demands the head of John the Baptist as reward. She

had surfaced several times in operatic history, usually with her more scandalous

features suppressed. Strauss’s brazenly modern retelling takes off from Oscar

Wilde’s 1891 play Salomé,

Strauss had a flair for beginnings. In 1896 he created what may be, after the

first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, the most famous opening flourish in music: the

“mountain sunrise” from

in which the princess shamelessly eroticizes the

body of John the Baptist and indulges in a touch of necrophilia at the end. When

Strauss read Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of Wilde—in which the

accent is dropped from Salomé’s name—he decided to set it to music word for

word, instead of employing a verse adaptation. Next to the first line, “How

beautiful is the princess Salome tonight,” he made a note to use the key of C-

sharp minor. But this would turn out to be a different sort of C-sharp minor from

Bach’s or Beethoven’s.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, deployed to great effect in

Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The passage draws its cosmic

power from the natural laws of sound. If you pluck a string tuned to a low C,

then pluck it again while pinching it in half, the tone rises to the next C above.

This is the interval of the octave. Further subdivisions yield intervals of the fifth

(C to G), the fourth (G to the next higher C), and the major third (C to E). These

are the lower steps of the natural harmonic series, or overtone series, which

shimmers like a rainbow from any vibrating string. The same intervals appear at

the outset of Zarathustra, and they accumulate into a gleaming C-major chord.

Salome, written nine years after Zarathustra, begins very differently, in a state

of volatility and flux. The first notes on the clarinet are simply a rising scale, but

it is split down the middle: the first half belongs to C-sharp major, the second

half to G major. This is an unsettling opening, for several reasons. First, the

notes C-sharp and G are separated by the interval known as the tritone, one

half-step narrower than the perfect fifth. (Leonard Bernstein’s “Maria” opens

with a tritone resolving to a fifth.) This interval has long caused uneasy

vibrations in human ears; scholars called it diabolus in musica,

In the

the musical

devil.

Salome scale, not just two notes but two key-areas, two opposing

harmonic spheres, are juxtaposed. From the start, we are plunged into an

environment where bodies and ideas circulate freely, where opposites meet.

There’s a hint of the glitter and swirl of city life: the debonairly gliding clarinet

looks forward to the jazzy character who kicks off Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

The scale might also suggest a meeting of irreconcilable belief systems; after

all, Salome takes place at the intersection of Roman, Jewish, and Christian

societies. Most acutely, this little run of notes takes us inside the mind of one

who is exhibiting all the contradictions of her world.

The first part of Salome

Then Herod comes onstage. The tetrarch is a picture of modern neurosis, a

sensualist with a yearning for the moral life, his music awash in overlapping

styles and shifting moods. He comes out on the terrace; looks for the princess;

gazes at the moon, which is “reeling through the clouds like a drunken woman”;

orders wine, slips in blood, stumbles over the body of a soldier who has

committed suicide; feels cold, feels a wind—there is a hallucination of wings

beating the air. It’s quiet again; then more wind, more visions. The orchestra

plays fragments of waltzes, expressionistic clusters of dissonance,

impressionistic washes of sound. There is a turbulent episode as five Jews in

Herod’s court dispute the meaning of the Baptist’s prophecies; two Nazarenes

respond with the Christian point of view.

focuses on the confrontation between Salome and the

prophet Jochanaan: she the symbol of unstable sexuality, he the symbol of

ascetic rectitude. She tries to seduce him, he shrinks away and issues a curse,

and the orchestra expresses its own fascinated disgust with an interlude in C-

sharp minor—in Jochanaan’s stentorian manner, but in Salome’s key.

When Herod persuades his stepdaughter to dance the Dance of the Seven

Veils, she does so to the tune of an orchestral interlude that, on first hearing,

sounds disappointingly vulgar in its thumping rhythms and pseudo-Oriental

exotic color. Mahler, when he heard Salome,

Salome now calls for the prophet’s head, and Herod, in a sudden religious

panic, tries to get her to change her mind. She refuses. The executioner

prepares to behead the Baptist in his cistern prison. At this point, the bottom

drops out of the music. A toneless bass-drum rumble and strangulated cries in

the double basses give way to a huge smear of tone in the full orchestra.

thought that his colleague had

tossed away what should have been the highlight of the piece. But Strauss

almost certainly knew what he was doing: this is the music that Herod likes, and

it serves as a kitschy foil for the grisliness to come.

At the climax, the head of John the Baptist lies before Salome on a platter.

Having disturbed us with unheard-of dissonances, Strauss now disturbs us with

plain chords of necrophiliac bliss. For all the perversity of the material, this is

still a love story, and the composer honors his heroine’s emotions. “The mystery

of love,” Salome sings, “is greater than the mystery of death.” Herod is horrified

by the spectacle that his own incestuous lust has engendered. “Hide the moon,

hide the stars!” he rasps. “Something terrible is going to happen!” He turns his

back and walks up the staircase of the palace. The moon, obeying his

command, goes behind the clouds. An extraordinary sound emanates from the

lower brass and winds: the opera’s introductory motif is telescoped—with one

half-step alteration—into a single glowering chord. Above it, the flutes and

clarinets launch into an obsessively elongated trill. Salome’s love themes rise

up again. At the moment of the kiss, two ordinary chords are mashed together,

creating a momentary eight-note dissonance.

The moon comes out again. Herod, at the top of the stairs, turns around, and

screams, “Kill that woman!” The orchestra attempts to restore order with an

ending in C minor, but succeeds only in adding to the tumult: the horns play fast

figures that blur into a howl, the timpani pound away at a four-note chromatic

pattern, the woodwinds shriek on high. In effect, the opera ends with eight bars

of noise.

The crowd roared its approval—that was the most shocking thing. “Nothing

more satanic and artistic has been seen on the German opera stage,” Decsey

wrote admiringly. Strauss held court that night at the Hotel Elefant, in a never-

to-be-repeated gathering that included Mahler, Puccini, and Schoenberg. When

someone declared that he’d rather shoot himself than memorize the part of

Salome, Strauss answered, “Me, too,” to general amusement. The next day, the

composer wrote to his wife, Pauline, who had stayed home in Berlin: “It is

raining, and I am sitting on the garden terrace of my hotel, in order to report to

you that ‘Salome’ went well, gigantic success, people applauding for ten

minutes until the fire curtain came down, etc., etc.”

Salome went on to be performed in some twenty-five different cities. The

triumph was so complete that Strauss could afford to laugh off criticism from

Kaiser Wilhelm II. “I am sorry that Strauss composed this Salome,” the Kaiser

reportedly said. “Normally I’m very keen on him, but this is going to do him a lot

of damage

On the train back to Vienna, Mahler expressed bewilderment over his

colleague’s success. He considered

.” Strauss would relate this story and add with a flourish: “Thanks to

that damage I was able to build my villa in Garmisch!”

Salome a significant and audacious

piece—“one of the greatest masterworks of our time,” he later said—and could

not understand why the public took an immediate liking to it. Genius and

popularity were, he apparently thought, incompatible. Traveling in the same

carriage was the Styrian poet and novelist Peter Rosegger. According to Alma,

when Mahler voiced his reservations, Rosegger replied that the voice of the

people is the voice of God—Vox populi, vox Dei.

The younger musicians from Vienna thrilled to the innovations in Strauss’s

score, but were suspicious of his showmanship. One group, including Alban

Berg, met at a restaurant to discuss what they had heard. They might well have

used the words that Adrian Leverkühn applies to Strauss in

Mahler asked whether he

meant the voice of the people at the present moment or the voice of the people

over time. Nobody seemed to know the answer to that question.

Doctor Faustus:

The Austrian premiere of

“What a gifted fellow! The happy-go-lucky revolutionary, cocky and conciliatory.

Never were the avantgarde and the box office so well acquainted. Shocks and

discords aplenty—then he good-naturedly takes it all back and assures the

philistines that no harm was intended. But a hit, a definite hit.” As for Adolf

Hitler, it is not certain that he was actually there; he may merely have claimed to

have attended, for whatever reason. But something about the opera evidently

stuck in his memory.

Salome was just one event in a busy season, but, like

a flash of lightning, it illuminated a musical world on the verge of traumatic

change. Past and future were colliding; centuries were passing in the night.

Mahler would die in 1911, seeming to take the Romantic era with him. Puccini’s

Turandot, unfinished at his death in 1924, would more or less end a glorious

Italian operatic history that began in Florence at the end of the sixteenth

century. Schoenberg, in 1908 and 1909, would unleash fearsome sounds that

placed him forever at odds with the vox populi. Hitler would seize power in 1933

and attempt the annihilation of a people. And Strauss would survive to a surreal

old age. “I have actually outlived myself,” he said in 1948. At the time of his

birth, Germany was not yet a single nation and Wagner had yet to finish the

Ring of the Nibelung.

At the time of Strauss’s death, Germany had been divided

into East and West, and American soldiers were whistling “Some Enchanted

Evening” in the streets.

The sleepy German city of Bayreuth is the one place on earth where the

nineteenth century springs eternal. Here, in 1876, Wagner presided over the

opening of his opera house and the first complete performance of the four-part

Richard I and III

Ring cycle. The emperors of Germany and Brazil, the kings of Bavaria and

Württemberg, and at least a dozen grand dukes, dukes, crown princes, and

princes attended the unveiling, together with leading composers of various

countries—Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Gounod—and journalists from around the

globe. Front-page reports ran for three straight days in the New York Times.

Bayreuth’s illusion of cultural omnipotence is maintained every summer during

the annual Wagner festival, when the cafés fill with people debating minor

points of the

Tchaikovsky, not a Wagner fan, was captivated by the sight of the diminutive,

almost dwarfish composer riding in a carriage directly behind the German

Kaiser, not the servant but the equal of the rulers of the world.

Ring

Until the advent of movies, there was no more astounding public entertainment

than the Wagner operas.

libretto, the composer’s visage stares out from the windows of

almost every shop, and piano scores for the operas are stacked on tables

outside bookstores. For a few weeks in July and August, Wagner remains the

center of the universe.

Tristan, Die Meistersinger, and the Ring were works of

mind-altering breadth and depth, towering over every artistic endeavor of their

time. Notwithstanding the archaic paraphernalia of rings, swords, and sorcery,

the Ring presented an imaginative world as psychologically particular as any in

the novels of Leo Tolstoy or Henry James. The story of the Ring

Even more fraught with implications is Wagner’s final drama,

was, in the

end, one of hubris and comeuppance: Wotan, the chief of the gods, loses

control of his realm and sinks into “the feeling of powerlessness.” He resembles

the head of a great bourgeois family whose livelihood is destroyed by the

modernizing forces that he himself has set in motion.

Parsifal, first heard

at Bayreuth in the summer of 1882. The plot should have been a musty, almost

childish thing: the “pure fool” Parsifal fights the magician Klingsor, takes from

him the holy lance that pierced Christ’s side, and uses it to heal the torpor that

has overcome the Knights of the Grail. But Parsifal’s mystical trappings

answered inchoate longings in end-of-century listeners, while the political

subtext—Wagner’s diseased knights can be read as an allegory of the diseased

West—fed the fantasies of the far right. The music itself is a portal to the

beyond. It crystallizes out of the air in weightless forms, transforms into rocklike

masses, and dissolves again. “Here time becomes space,” the wise knight

Gurnemanz intones, showing Parsifal the way to the Grail temple, as a four-

note bell figure rings hypnotically through the orchestra.

By 1906, twenty-three years after his death, Wagner had become a cultural

colossus, his influence felt not only in music but in literature, theater, and

painting. Sophisticated youths memorized his librettos as American college

students of a later age would recite Bob Dylan. Anti-Semites and

ultranationalists considered Wagner their private prophet, but he gave impetus

to almost every major political and aesthetic movement of the age: liberalism

(Théodore de Banville said that Wagner was a “democrat, a new man, wanting

to create for all the people”), bohemianism (Baudelaire hailed the composer as

the vessel of a “counter-religion, a Satanic religion”), African-American activism

(a story in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk tells of a young black

man who finds momentary hope in Lohengrin), feminism (M. Carey Thomas,

president of Bryn Mawr College, said that Lohengrin made her “feel a little like

my real self”), and even Zionism (Theodor Herzl first formulated his vision of a

Jewish state after attending a performance of

The English composer Edward Elgar pored over the Meister’s scores with

desperate intensity, writing in his copy of

Tannhäuser).

Tristan, “This Book contains … the

Best and the whole of the Best of This world and the Next.” Elgar somehow

converted the Wagnerian apparatus—the reverberating leitmotifs, the viscous

chromatic harmony, the velvety orchestration—into an iconic representation of

the British Empire at its height. As a result, he won a degree of international

renown that had eluded English composers for centuries; after a German

performance of his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, in Russia, rummaged through Wagner for useful

material and left the rest behind; in

in 1902, Richard Strauss

saluted Elgar as the “first English progressivist.”

The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh,

the tale of a magical city that disappears from view when it comes under attack,

Parsifal-like

Puccini came up with an especially crafty solution to the Wagner problem. Like

many of his generation, he rejected mystic subjects of the

bells ring out in endless patterns, intertwined with a tricky new

harmonic language that would catch the ear of the young Stravinsky. Even

Sergei Rachmaninov, who inherited a healthy skepticism for Wagner from his

idol Tchaikovsky, learned from Wagner’s orchestration how to bathe a Slavic

melody in a sonic halo.

Parsifal type; instead,

he followed Pietro Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo, composers of

Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, into the new genre of verismo, or opera

verité, where popular tunes mingled with blood-and-thunder orchestration and

all manner of contemporary characters—prostitutes, gangsters, street urchins, a

famously jealous clown—invaded the stage. Almost nothing on the surface of

Puccini’s mature operas sounds unmistakably Wagnerian. The influence is

subterranean: you sense it in the way melodies emerge from the orchestral